"History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition."
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Quote collection
Terence McKenna quotes (page 18 of 36)
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"There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology."
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"It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it."
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"The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us."
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"If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind."
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"People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting."
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"It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives."
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"It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it."
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"Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree."
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"This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time."
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"You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud."
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"Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view."
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"I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present."
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"Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: 'The galaxy lies waiting.'"
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"We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination."
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"Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else."
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"We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language."
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"I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way."
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"The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being."
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"So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions."
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